Always Fighting
by Behindthebook08
Summary: If you thought that the Arena was the worst part of Katniss Everdeen's experience's with the Hunger Games, you were unquestionably wrong. Katniss' journey through they eyes of Haymitch. (Haymiss one-shot)


**A/N: To all my HP readers, sorry for this showing up in your email! A bit of Hunger Games which has been floating around my head. A bit on the dramatic side, but I like it, and I hope you do to. Please Review, and let me know what you think. I'm new to this fandom and would love your imput! Thanks!**

* * *

"I don't know what I'm going to do with her Effie!" I took another swig from my bottle as I tried desperately to explain it to the Capitol woman, "She isn't humble, she isn't kind, she isn't witty, and she sure as hell isn't sexy. She has all the manners of an inarticulate slug! How am I supposed to sell that? Sell slug?"

"Now Haymitch, dear, I'm sure she isn't all that bad. Sure—she is a bit, rough around the edges, but isn't all of District 12?" Her tight lipped smile and high-pitched voice is grating on my nerves, and I know she won't understand, can't understand. "Just sell her as a _family_ girl, make everyone wish they had a sister like her! She volunteered for hers, so it can't be that difficult to make her seem selfless." Just as the words left her mouth the elevator doors opened to reveal a sweat drenched Katniss snarling at Peeta—again.

"Just leave me the hell alone, dough-boy!" she screeches. I raise an eyebrow at Effie, yes, she is such a sweetheart.

"Look Katniss, I was just trying to help!" he bumbles, "I'm sorry!"

She turns quickly towards him, "If you lay another finger on me, I will make sure that you go into that arena with one less finger! Got it?" He nods ever so slightly as he backs towards his bedroom door, eventually disappearing completely. I pity the boy; I can definitely sell _him _as sweet.

She's looking at me now, as if expecting something. "Can I help you with something, sweetheart?"

She glares at me again, before thundering into her own room, the door slamming behind her. I look back at Effie, "Did I do something wrong again? She's always yelling."

Effie just tuts at me as she walks towards to elevator, "Believe it or not, Haymitch, Katniss Everdeen is just as much a lady as I am, and perhaps, if you want to know what is the matter with her, you should try _asking_." She gives me a little wave as the doors close around her, and I sigh.

_This_ is why I needed a second mentor—I female mentor. Then I wouldn't have to deal with this sixteen year old bullshit. I grab a bottle of whiskey and head towards her door, just as I am about to knock I hear the extremely faint sound of crying. _Fuck._ I consider Effie for a moment, consider knocking, but I am terrible with crying women, and what could I possibly do? I'll just piss her off more.

I turn around and leave, I'm sure she'll feel better after the interviews are finished.

* * *

She's late.

Goddamned female tributes. Goddamned stylists. Goddamned—goddamn it! Where the hell is that girl? She was supposed to be here ten minutes ago, the show starts in three! Doesn't she understand that this could be the difference between life and death for her?

Just as the first wall connects with my fist the elevator doors clang open behind me, and I can't help but prays that it's her. Turning around I know that I should have noticed how frightened she looked, I should have noticed the fear and discomfort—a better man would have noticed that.

I'm not that man.

My eyes are on her legs—her long, tanned, muscular legs. Closing my eyes for a moment I hear that better man piping up, _her_ _highly illegal_ _legs_, he tells me. I exhale and open my eyes again, taking in her full appearance. I have to admit, I'm impressed. Her hair is different—clean; it falls in soft waves down her back. Her dress is a vibrant scarlet and full length, but somehow—god save the men in that audience—somehow her entire legs appear every time she steps. Every curve of her body is visible, and accessible, and the bright red lipstick only adds to the appeal.

She's staring at her feet, and that's what reminds me of exactly who she is—and why she's here. I quickly turn on my cold-bastard personae and smirk towards her stylist, "Damn, Cinna. I heard you were good—but you are truly a miracle worker. How the hell did you pull this off?"

Cinna looks at me icily, "I had good material to work with," he says with a bite. I flinch, who knew that man had attitude like that?

"Well you look good, sweetheart. Now, how's about you start acting the part. Head up, shoulders back, and smile—but no teeth. All sex-appeal and power, got it?"

She nods slightly, and then glances up at me from underneath her eyelashes. _Damn. Does she know what she's doing?_ "Haymitch," she whispers, "I don't like this—I don't want to do this."

I'm confused for a moment, but then her name is being called, and I'm pushing her towards the stage. What is going on with this girl?

* * *

I stand staring at the closed door, trying to convince myself to knock. I still don't understand why this is my job. If the boy is the one who pissed her off, why isn't he groveling? She didn't hit _me. _Still, someone has got to get her head back in the game, and I suppose that's my job.

I knock, and I hear her swearing as she comes to the door. I'm pissed, and drunk, and don't feel like dealing with her—the last thing I expect is to feel bad for her. She is standing in the door wearing an oversized sweatshirt as a dress, her hair is soaked, and it's obvious that she has been crying again. I peer into her room and can see the glass shards sprinkled across the floor—she's been throwing things again as well.

"You know, you shouldn't step on that stuff. The last thing you need is to enter the arena already injured." She just looks at me blankly.

"I'll keep that in mind," she tells me, as she continues to stare. She is trying to figure out what I'm doing here.

I let myself in, and ignore the glare as she shuts the door, "Alright, sweetheart, I don't think either of us is really the small-talk type, so I'm gonna cut to the chase. What's the matter with you?" Her eyebrows shoot up her forehead, what does she think she's been keeping it a secret?

She unceremoniously flops herself on her bed, staring at me intently, then she shakes her head slightly. "I'll be fine, Haymitch. Thanks for asking though."

As I rake a hand through my hair again, I can't help but think that I'll be bald by the time this game is finished. "Look—I'm sorry, I should have warned you about Peeta's announcement; I know you don't like surprises. But he really did help you out there, I meant that."

She twitches slightly, "You really think his _announcement _is what made me hit him?" she asks.

"Yes?"

She laughs at me, a real laugh—the first I've heard from her. "Haymitch, I couldn't care less if he wants to say that. I'm pissed because people want me to say it back, and I'm pissed because the little pervert grabbed my ass as we walked off stage. I'm hoping that bit didn't make it on television." She glares towards me slightly as she continues, "I'm pissed that every guy in that training center thinks it's okay to rub up against me, grab me, or fucking _lick _me."

"Lick you?" I interrupt, and she nods.

"Oh yea, District 4 decided to pull that yesterday. He licked me. And they keep cornering me in the elevator, or in dark corners. They keep _distracting _me, and I can't do shit about it. Every time I threaten them, they kindly remind me that hitting a fellow tribute _before _entering the arena is punishable by immediate death." Now she is the one raking her hands through her hair. "That is why I'm pissed, Haymitch. Not because of some stupid teenage declaration of love."

"Damnit, I'm sorry kid. I should have put a stop to that right away. I thought you were just always this much of a charmer. Don't take it to personally though, they're just messing around. They don't mean anything by it."

I don't realize I've said something wrong until a vase is flying past my face and shattering against a nearby wall. "Tell that to district 2, or district 6—hell, tell that to Peeta! Tell them they were just _messing around_." A glass candleholder shatters against another wall. "It's not _messing around_, Haymitch. I know it's probably been a while for you, but that is called rape, Haymitch. Not messing around, not having fun, not _guys just being guys_, rape."

She's finally stopped throwing things, and is sitting on the bed again while I try and regains some semblance of control. Is this what the games had turned into? It was bad enough when it was just killing—but this sort of thing was different. Damnit, I should have been paying more attention. "Katniss," I start, trying to find the words, "Did they?—Do you mean to say that—Are you—"

"Not in so many words, Haymitch," she sighs. "I got away before they could get that far." She's blushing now, and I realize that she never meant to say any of this to me. "Still illegal," she's mumbling.

"Fuck."

She smirks slightly, "Didn't quite get to that point, Haymitch." And I can't help but laugh, despite the situation. The girl has my dark twisted sense of humor—I wish she didn't need it.

"Here's the deal, sweetheart, there isn't much I can do now. But until you get in that arena, I'll be with you—you just got yourself a bodyguard." She laughs slightly, and I can't help but think I'm enjoying her laugh a bit too much. "But here's the good news, when you get in that arena? You can tear off their fucking balls and feed them to 'em and no one will stop you. The capitol will love you all the more for it—castration makes for great television."

I can see in her eyes that she is considering it—though I know she isn't really the type. She isn't sadistic, just feisty, but she still won't have much trouble killing those boys. "So that's what all the door slamming has been about?" I ask, double checking, and she nods. "I guess I should have listened to Effie sooner. She's been trying to get me in here for days."

She looks at me for a moment and then shrugs, "You're lucky I answered the door—earlier I would have thrown a vase at your head."

It's then that I decide that she will survive—and she does.

* * *

It's a year later when I find her on my doorstep at 3 am. As I open the door for her she crumples and I find myself more frightened then I ever was for her in the arena.

Katniss Everdeen doesn't do this—or at least she hasn't since that night. She is strong, she fights, and even when she does break down, she gets angry. She doesn't break down crying in a man's entryway. She's apologizing for bothering me, and I almost laugh, but instead I simply pull her inside and to the couch, and I wait for the crying to stop.

Finally she looks at me, her eyes so swollen that she _must _have a headache, and she tells me that she had a visitor that day. When the name Finnick Odair is whispered, I know why she was crying.

"Don't worry," I whisper, "I won't let them do that. You're safe." I'm making promises without thinking, and I don't know how I can possibly stop them, but I know I will. I know I'll find a way, because they can't break her, I can't let them break her.

"Haymitch," she says, defeated, "You can't stop them."

"Don't worry about it, Hummingbird; they're not going to touch you." She smiles at the nickname, neither of us knows how it started, but at some point she became my Hummingbird, and her real name was forgotten.

"Haymitch, they'll kill my family." I cringe; I know damn well what they'll do. They did it to me when I refused—when I tried to call their bluff.

"I won't let them," I tell her again. "I won't let them." I don't know when the tables turned; I don't know when she started comforting me, instead of the other way around. It's wrong, and I know I should be helping her, but as she wraps her arms around me, all I can do is accept them. "Finnick is an old friend of mine, I'll—I'll talk to him in the morning. We'll find an answer. We'll fix it."

"Maybe no one will want me," she whispers. "Maybe, they won't be interested and the Capitol won't have a choice."

I could practically cry hearing the slight hope in her voice; she actually thinks that is a possibility. "Katniss, sweetheart, there is no good way to say this—there isn't going to be a single straight man who _doesn't _want you. You don't see yourself the way everyone else does, but I promise you, you not being wanted will not be a problem for the Capitol. If anything, you will steal business from Finnick."

She laughs then, and rests her head on my shoulder. "You're full of shit, Haymitch. The only men who are interested in me are desperate virgin boys about to be put to death. And I'm certainly not Capitol material." I just shake my head; I know I won't convince her; I never could, and why should I? Let the girl have her hope, for once her bad self-esteem is a comfort. I won't take that from her. Not tonight.

As it turns out, she never has to worry about that anyways. Instead of attracting customers, she attracts rebellion. I'm not sure which was worse for her.

* * *

The war ends and she is sent back to her cell in District 12—she's unharmed, other than the fact that she is completely emotionally shattered.

She stays awake at first, staring into the fire. She doesn't move, she doesn't eat, and she doesn't speak. She spends days just staring into that fire. After I find her passed out from malnourishment, I feed her after that, force some nutrition and hydration into her, but when she wakes up I leave, and she stares into the fire once again.

I know it was wrong, leaving her like that. I knew that she needed someone to help her reclaim her life, help her reacclimate to the world, but I never knew how to be that person. I can't sit with her each day, watching her die, and pretend that everything is alright. I understand her too well. I know every thought that is going through that girl's mind, because I've lived those nightmares myself. Sitting there, watching her, it's like watching myself—except I love her a hell of a lot more.

When the boy came into town, early in the spring, he had wanted to see her. He wanted to apologize, but it was forbidden by his doctors. I think he thought I would ignore them, I was never one to really play by the rules, but I did that time. He hated me for it.

He waited on his porch, so patiently, hoping she would come to him. He didn't know that she never stopped watching the fire.

There was one night, late in May, when he tried to see her. He thought that I would be too drunk to notice, he didn't know how carefully I watched the girl. He snuck into her house at 3 in the morning, and I followed him. I decided to see what would happen, see if maybe he could handle it. As soon as he saw her, broken and staring into that damned fire, he broke as well. His eyes turned black and it was as if he was in the hospital all over again. He lunged at her, snarling and spitting.

She was lucky that I was sober that night. It took all of my strength to drag him out of her house, to knock him out. The next morning, when he woke up tied to a chair in my living room, he didn't remember a damned thing. I told him the truth—he didn't leave his porch again.

That didn't stop him from hearing the screams though, he could hear them from his porch, and I could hear them from my kitchen. He called me right away, but I didn't pick up, I was already running for her house. I thought the boy had gone for her again, but when I arrived she was curled up in the fireplace—clutching a knife to her chest, her clothes singed and soot covered. She screamed blindly into the night, desperately warning a sister long since dead.

I ran to her, trying to talk reason as she struggled with her knife, I finally won, throwing it away. "Katniss, it's me, Haymitch. You're safe right now, you're safe." The more I spoke, the calmer she seemed to get. Eventually she looked at me, and it was as if the sun had just come out from behind the clouds. She hadn't looked at me once since that day in the Capitol, since the day she assassinated the President. "Hiya Hummingbird." I said, smiling despite myself.

"Haymitch?" she whispered, voice cracked from months of disuse.

"It's me."

"Safe?" she croaked.

"At the moment, sweetheart." She nodded slightly then, and allowed me to move her out of the fireplace. "You're lucky that the fire was out sweetheart."

"Girl on fire," she mumbled, and I laughed.

"I don't think you were supposed to take that literally." She nodded slightly and fell asleep in my arms. I groaned slightly—_this _was not supposed to be my job. Holding damaged, sleeping women—chasing away the nightmares. I didn't generally stick around that long. I was about to shove her on to the couch, when I made the mistake of looking at her—really looking at her. I had avoided that for the last several months, she had just been so damn sad; I didn't like to think about it. But now, as I looked at her, she looked surprisingly peaceful. Beaten down, malnourished, and haunted—but also suddenly peaceful.

So I let her sleep.

Every night for a month I woke up to her screams, and every night for a month I found her. Crouched in corners, curled up in closets, huddled underneath the table. Always screaming, always desperately clutching that knife to her chest.

Every morning the boy asked me why she screamed, why it had started. She never screamed before. He was so worried, and yet me? I was just happy. I understood something that boy didn't. If she was screaming, it meant she was sleeping. And if she slept, she could start to heal.

Katniss Everdeen was fighting again.

It's now the end of August, and suddenly she's speaking to me, as if she never stopped—I've spent months waiting, and now she's here. She stood up this morning, she showered and dressed, and then she asked me if I liked my eggs scrambled.

I was so confused I fell off my chair—literally. The woman, who had been nearly catatonic for months, was suddenly awake and making me breakfast. I wasn't about to complain.

After breakfast she looked at me, "Haymitch," she started, "Why are you always here?"

"What?" I haven't got a clue what this girl is on about, where is this coming from?

"You're always here. Everytime I wake up, you're in my house. Why?"

I didn't realize that she even knew I was here. She was always so lost; I didn't think she saw me at all. But I'm always honest with her; honesty is the only way that she and I know, that's how we work. We sometimes hide things, but we never lie. "You were near dead." I try to explain, "I came to make sure you didn't die. Then you started screaming—scared the bread boy half to death, so I came to wake you up."

"Peeta is back?" she asks carefully, as I nod. "Why hasn't he come?"

This is one of those moments, those moments where we hide things from each other—because she doesn't need to know that, not now that she is finally back. She may not have loved him, hell she hated the boy most of the time, but he was solid. He was constant, and she always knew what to expect from him. It had almost killed her when he had been taken. She didn't need to know that he _had _come, and that he had tried to kill her.

"He isn't allowed to come here, Katniss, doctor's orders. He can't approach you."

She nods silently as she begins dishes—halfway through them starts throwing things, and I duck under the table as glass and clay shatters against the walls. "Kat—Katniss—_Hummingbird!_" I shout, but she hears none of it as she throws, kicks, or beats upon every object she comes near.

Finally I give in, ducking out from behind the table and grabbing her arms, a shard of glass lightly knicks my cheek. She stares into my eyes, petrified for a moment, before she calms, and I can feel the blood dripping down my cheek. I laugh slightly, "So are you going to tell me what you're upset about sweetheart, or should I just assume you're reliving our first real conversation."

She looks at me unsurely for a moment, before chuckling slightly.

She chuckled, laughed, giggled! Whatever the hell you want to call it, she found some goddamned humor again! I could cry out with relief, she was going to be alright. She's just like me, I know that much. Dark humor and cynicism are like oxygen to her—she's a girl of the Seam, through and through.

"It's not alright," she whispers, "he shouldn't be like that. They shouldn't have let him be like that."

I can only nod in response, closing my eyes when she lifts a hand to wipe away the blood. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have started throwing things—I just do that, I don't quite know why. Ever since I was little, when something made me angry, I would start throwing things. It's childish, I know."

I can feel myself smiling; it isn't difficult to imagine a young Katniss surrounded by broken bits after a particularly nasty tantrum. "There are worse things you could do," I tell her with a shrug, and she smiles at me.

"It drove my mother mad," she says with a slightly devilish smile.

I watch her, as she rinses my blood off her hand. There are days when she is so young to me, so lost, and so desperately in need of caring for. There are days when she looks ten years younger than she is, and when I just want to save her.

Then there are days like this. I haven't had a day like this in several years. When we came back from the arena the first time, she had tried so hard to be normal. To survive. She had wanted to help me and had spent many mornings making breakfast in my kitchen. In those moments, when she was cooking in my kitchen and dancing around to the slight tune on her lips, those moments made me forget the rules.

They made me forget her age and how damaged she was. They just made me love her.

Today is one of those days, despite the news about Peeta; she still has a slight smile gracing her lips. Her hair is falling in her eyes, and despite how tired she is, she still finds that little spark of trouble dancing in her eyes. She looks young and old all at once—ageless.

It takes me a moment to realize that I've kissed her. She's staring at me as if she's suddenly woken up, and I'm not quite sure if that is a good thing or not, but then her lips are moving against mine and I can feel her smiling against me. I had spent years trying not to see her, not to look at her. I had spent years trying to be the older brother, the mentor, even the parental type—but I never could make the leap.

I looked at her and I always saw her in that oversized sweatshirt, eyes flaming and hair wet, glass shattered at her feet. She was never a child to me, nor was she the _girl on fire_.

She was a woman, and she was my hummingbird. And to hell with what was _right_, if I am so lucky as to be kissed back by a woman like her—I'm not going to stop simply because someone says it's improper.

"I didn't think you would ever see me that way," she's smirking up at me, and I kiss her again, because I can't even pretend that her smirk isn't the sexiest thing I've ever seen.

"Katniss, I don't think I ever _haven't _seen you that way," I tell her with a grin.

She raises an eyebrow at me, "I seem to recall being compared to a slug."

I cringe slightly; of course she would have heard that conversation. "Would it help if I told you that you're a very _sexy_ slug?"

Her laughter fills my kitchen and I find myself smiling a real smile for the first time in so many years. She's laughing. She's smiling. She's joking.

She's still fighting. And she's fighting next to me now.

* * *

**Thank you so much for reading! Again, please review and let me know what you think!**


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